The robots have come for our jobs, and the decline in labor
participation is, for Gross, a clear sign that this trend is not
something we should fight but rather something we should accept.

It's all over but the handouts.

Here's Gross (emphasis mine):

We should spend money where it's needed most — our
collapsing infrastructure for instance, health care for an aging
generation and perhaps on a revolutionary new idea called UBI —
Universal Basic Income. If more and more workers are
going to be displaced by robots, then they will need money to
live on, will they not?

And if that strikes you as a form of socialism, I would
suggest we get used to it. Even Donald Trump claims he
won't leave anyone out on the street — a liberal Republican
thought if there ever was one. And they are on the street you
know. Check out any major downtown in the U.S. if you want to see
our future culture. Not the stadiums with the box seats; the
streets with the tents and grocery carts.

But the concept of UBI is not really new or foreign to
capitalistic cultures like that of the U.S. We already have sort
of a UBI floor. It's called food stamps and the earned-income tax
credit, but those alone will not keep the growing jobless and
homeless off city and suburban streets. The question is
how high this UBI should be and how to pay for it, not whether
it's coming in the next decade. It is.

So it's settled then: free money for everyone.

Gross argues that more conservatives than liberals support the
idea, and he is struck by how much Silicon Valley-types love the
idea of universal basic income. (Y Combinator's Sam Altman is
perhaps the face of the idea and is funding a study
to explore the impacts of a universal basic income.)

Gross' cynicism, on the Silicon Valley front at least, is that
you need to give people money because all those iPhones won't buy
themselves.

Gross also argues that he's really not even sure what the holdup
is: We already give people money in the form of programs like
welfare and the earned income tax credit. Which is basically
true!

The problem for UBI — and this goes a bit beyond the confines of
Gross' letter — is that in the US we have attached a stigma to
receiving certain types of government assistance, and the
sociopolitical hurdles to a basic income program are very high.

Elsewhere in his outlook, the usual targets end up on Gross' bad
side: central banks, politicians, and more or less the entire
modern capitalism project.

Also young people.

"Who could say that an older generation was any less an
ideal than the succeeding one?" Gross writes. "My experience of
the divide between Boomers and Xers is like that; I recognize
that youth will be served, but not always for the better."